Marching orders from House GOP on smoking ban?

Our View:

Virginia Delegate Dan Bowling offered a unique defense of his vote to kill smoking-ban legislation. The Republican leadership made him do it.

Bowling’s defense is particularly problematic because he’s a Democrat. He owes no allegiance to the Republican House leadership.

And yet, Bowling told The Voice, an alternative newspaper in Buchanan County, that he was compelled to vote as the Republicans desired.

"We were told that we were expected to vote that way because they wanted a 5-0 vote" against the bills, Bowling told The Voice.

Bowling was one of six members of the House Alcoholic Beverage Control and Gaming Subcommittee who voted down eight separate smoking-ban proposals. He is the sole Democrat on the subcommittee. The votes were unanimous, but there is no official record of them, since the House does not record subcommittee votes.

More problematic from the standpoint of the democratic process, Bowling and his subcommittee henchmen represent just 6 percent of the House membership. Such a small fraction of the House shouldn’t be able to scuttle an issue so vital to the health and well-being of state residents.

The smoking-ban measures – which sailed through the Senate with bipartisan support – deserve a full and fair hearing in the House.

Bowling’s efforts to spin his vote in the best light possible don’t end with his rather disingenuous claim that the Republicans made him do it. He also challenges our assertion in a previous editorial that he took $1,500 from the tobacco industry last year.

Bowling told The Voice that he might have accepted "several small checks" that added up to $1,500 over the "time that he has been an elected delegate."

Actually, Bowling accepted two contributions from Richmond-based Altria – $500 last June and $250 in 2006 – and $750 from S&M Brands last May. Perhaps those are what he means by small checks.

We didn’t make those numbers up; they come from the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project and are taken from official state campaign finance disclosure forms filled out by the candidate. The records can be found on the Internet at http://www.vpap.org.

Bowling was elected in 2006 to fill the unexpired term of Delegate Jackie Stump and was re-elected in 2007. In both years, he bested Mickey McGlothlin, a Buchanan County lawyer, for the Democratic nomination. The 2006 race also featured a Republican and two independents.

During the Democratic nominating contests, McGlothlin was dogged by allegations that he wasn’t a "true Democrat" because he had given a substantial sum of money to Jerry Kilgore, a Republican gubernatorial candidate. One wonders how Bowling’s apparent allegiance to the Republican House leadership will play with those who supported him because they thought he was a true blue Democrat.

In fairness, Bowling offers another defense of his vote. Such loyalty to the Republicans is necessary in order to bring home the pork to his district.

In the same article in The Voice, Bowling said he had to vote that way in order to keep his seat on the Appropriations Committee. He also suggested his vote was necessary to secure $250,000 for the Booth Center – a distance learning facility on the campus of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy. Of course, most of the funding for that project came from a private benefactor and from the Appalachian Regional Commission. And it seems unlikely that Delegate Terry Kilgore, who is the House Republican Caucus chairman and a solid supporter of the law school, would have pulled funding or allowed others to do so for such a project because of a vote on the smoking-ban bills.

Bowling’s explanations just don’t make sense.

If Bowling opposes a public smoking ban, he should say so. He should be man enough to stand behind his vote rather than claiming that the Republicans made him do it.